All About Color

We had fun learning how to "key" a painting last week, but this week was all about choosing a Color Scheme for our paintings and mixing Color....

Color Theory -

If you work well with value, you have 90% of the color work done. 

The Four Aspects of Color:

Value - The Lightness or Darkness of a Color

Chroma - The Intensity or Brightness/Dullness of a Color (gray has less Chroma)

Temperature - The Warmness or Coolness of a Color (most often light is warmer - shadow is darker)

Hue - The Color Name or Local Color

Create Harmony in your painting by using Color - 

Choose your color Scheme in advance and Mix your Colors before your begin your painting. Use your first pile, or Mother Color, to mix your next pile and then your next.

Color Schemes That Work -

Complimentary

Split Complimentary

Analogus

Triadic 

We practiced by painting little studies using any of the four Color Schemes...

Color Mixing -  MIXING the color you SEE 

To mix the color you are looking at, isolate the color if you can. Now describe what you are seeing….. 

What is its hue? (common name of local color)

What is the value? (light, middle light, medium, middle dark or dark?)

What is the saturation? (brighter or duller?)

When I want to mix a color that I see, I will first name it – comparing it to the color wheel. Does it lean toward red, yellow or blue? Is it a secondary color (something between one of these?).

I start with a dab of that. Now I ask myself – is it lighter or darker? Adjust, then ask again – is it warmer or cooler.

** If you are mixing and comparing and you are close, you’ve got the value right but it’s not yet there, then consider if the color you see is warmer or cooler than the color you mixed. If it looks warmer than your mix, add a warm hue. Depending on what colors you are working with go with yellow ocher or orange, or something on the warm side of the color wheel. If it is cooler, go to the cool side of the color wheel.

Practice mixing your Palette Colors and Mother Colors.

Exercise #5

Neutral Colors or Grays 

Don’t forget, color does not shine without gray! Do this exercise to find out why…

Paint a gray box. Then paint a bright red color around it. 

Now do this again and try painting the gray a different value.

Find out what happens with two compliments when you change the value and chroma of one.

Paint a green box. Then paint a bright red color around it.

Now try painting the green a different value & with less chroma than the red.

What happens to the red? It will become more intense.

Also, you will notice that if you make the gray a different value than the color (hue) it will be more pleasing to the eye.

Remember this..

Colors relate to what is around them. 

Painting Light -

When you are painting a subject that is dealing with light and shadow, think temperature. The shadow is usually cooler and the sunlit area is warmer.

Certain things just start out being light or dark, that is value.

But, when you are dealing with a subject under light and shadow, think more in terms of temperature.

Most often an object, when the light is not hitting it - it will be cooler.

When your object is hit with light, it will be warmer.

Preparing to paint - Mother Colors - 

The best paintings are the more Simple Paintings. Choose a simple design, a dominant Value and a Color Scheme - then premix your Mother Colors.

These are the piles of mixed paint that you premix. Squint at your subject and mix what you see (while squinting) in the large shapes. Go for Value before Color. 

I know this is a lot to think about before your even start your painting. Do your design and value study and you will be most of the way there. It will become automatic if you practice this every time. Before long you can do it all in just a few minutes. Trust me! It’s worth the effort!! You will save time and frustration later on.

Color Mixing &Value Workshop This Week

These past couple of weeks we have been learning about color and value in the beginning oil painting classes at the School of Light and Color.

I was surprised and delighted that these students were more than willing to use their class time to make charts. I have a wonderful group of students both on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday mornings at the school. These students want to do the work in order to learn. I know it's tough to come into a class as a beginner, especially when we feel that everybody else knows more than we do. But if you can take that risk  and show up, you find out that we are all students, and eventually we figure out that it is a lifetime journey and not a quick study. I love it when one of the gals or guys fall in love with the process, and after getting through the initial stunning fact that it isn't as easy as they thought, become willing to take on the challenge. It is so exciting to see that look on their faces as they light up with an "Aha" moment. 

Anyway, back to the exercises. We drew some one inch squares and put the complements on either side. It is surprising what you can learn by doing simple exercises like mixing complementary colors to make beautiful grays. We mixed the a little of one complement into the other, then a little more, then half and half. It was also interesting to begin to mix white into these mixes where the beautiful grays began to emerge.

We talked about the importance of using grays in your painting, and that it is also important to use value to state a predominant - middle and little value design in your paintings.

Then we made value charts using color, first using black and white to light and darken, and the other using analogous (colors next to our main color on the color wheel) colors to keep as much chroma (rich color) in our mixes as possible.

We talked how to use value changes to turn a form and how value and color are dependent on what you are comparing it to. We squinted to see our values.

After that we made a value scale in black and white, then found paint colors from the tube and matched the value on the scale. After using tube color, we used mixes and found the value using the same scale.

I believe these exercises are invaluable....because we actually learn from DOING. It's all fine to read about this stuff in the art books and magazines, but we will miss the connection if you don't actually do the work. Also, we will learn more from making mistakes than if we don't make mistakes. So we were freed up to make them!

My hope is that when these students are painting their next painting they will reach for a color/value on the palette, and not just think in color alone. They will begin to see value and color all around them. It is not easy but I'm hoping that they will begin to group smaller shapes into larger value shapes, and then begin to design a painting using these concepts. It will take time, and we can only learn so much at a time, so sometime in the next 6 months we probably do this all over again.

Hawthorne on Painting - More Good Stuff

New Painting - "Plein Air Garden, Paris"
Oil on Linen, 20 x 16 "
Available

If you read my blog regularly you know I am re-reading my "Hawthorne on Painting" book again. It is hitting me as though I had never read it before. Maybe I'm just ready to hear it this time.
Anyway, it if filled with so many tips about color and light that I feel I have to share.....

It is divided into sections and right now I am reading from the INTRODUCTION & LANDSCAPE sections:
INTRODUCTION:
pg 18 - Everyone knows what a man looks like, or a tree or a house, but it is our job to tell the world something about these things that it has not known before, some impression that we alone have received.
pg 19 - If you are not going to get a thrill, how can you give someone else one? You must feel the beauty of the thing before you start. Good painting is an excitement, an aesthetic emotion--reasonable painting destroys emotion. Painters don't reason, they do. The moment they reason they are lost--subconscious thought counts.
The only way to learn to paint is by painting. To really study, you must start out with large tubes of paint and a large palette and not stinit in any way as far as materials go. If you look into the past of a successful painter you will find square miles of canvas behind him. It is work that counts, experience in seeing color.
Don't try to be an artist all at once, be very much of a student.
pg 20 - Do studies not pictures. Know when you are licked--start another. Be alive, stop when your interest is lost.
LANDSCAPE:
pg 54 - It's the artist's business, the painter's job to point out to the public the beauties of nature.
Try to see them before you paint. Don't try to see a picture--go around and look at the subject until you see something, say in trees or houses, coming together, that inspires you. We do well the things we see already painted in our mind's eye--don't do it until you see it or you are defeated before you begin.
**Look at the view with your head sideways to get better relations, so that you get a sensation of the color spots rather than a perception of objects as objects.
pg 70 - Realize the value of putting down your first impression quickly.

**It seems like this works like squinting. Also Don Hatfield says to look at the value/color of what is next to the area you are painting in order to find the correct color/value. Very valuable information!

This is the way I want to paint. Some of the teachers I've worked with who talk like Hawthorne are Anita Wolff, Jim Smyth, Brigitte Curt, Ovanes Berberian and Don Hatfield. Wonderful painters all.

Hawthorne on Painting

I got out this book again. It is one of those that will never leave you without some new insight....
I have been teaching the Still Life in my weekly classes. I have some very new students and this is very new for them. We set up a simple still life, get out our view finders, and start painting. This is how you learn to SEE!
Excerpts from the book:
The painting of still life gives one the widest range for study--
a bottle is as serious a subject for the portraiture as a person. In arranging, place things so they have color and so that you can see it well. If you cannot decide on color and values in the beginning, move your still life around until you get things simple so that you can see big relations.
Select one light thing against a dark thing--a kitchen utensil and a lemon cut in half--try for spots coming together.
You don't hear me say much about drawing. It is because I think drawing the form, and painting, are better separated. The first thing is to learn to see color. You will draw better a year from now if you disregard for the time being the thing you call drawing. Realize that you haven't yet the painting point of view--after you have got the spots of true color in their proper relations, you have something to draw with and you can then consider it. Don't consciously try not to  draw but do the other thing so well that it will draw itself.
Don't look up at the nature and consider an inch at a time. See what one big spot is in relation to the other big spots.
Search always for more beautiful notes of color, don't search to put more things in.
Study larger spots of color coming together--don't break objects up into too many colors.
Establish big general things. You can't make all the differences you see.
Insist all the time on one spot being right relatively to another. I'm trying to say that when you think straight that thought alone is worth while and when you put down one or two notes that are right that's all that is necessary. You'd be surprised at how little work it takes to make a picture.

This is about a page. There is so much in this book - tons of information. Every time I read it I understand it on  a new level.
I find the above information very exciting. This is what we are striving to do in class, to SEE COLOR.. I learned a lot of this from Don Hatfield who is also teaching at the Capital Art Center in Sacramento.